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48

century it first became easier to carry a hundred-weight across a hundred miles
of sea than to transport it over an equivalent stretch of land. That time did
come earlier than the with the Phoenicians earlier even than the Minoaus; if not earlier and since then we have thought of the
Mediterranean as connecting the continents even more than it divides them.

The difficulties of crossing the Arctic may seem formidable to-day,
but the crossing of the Mediterranean must have appeared for even more formidable to
the earliest experimental navigators who paddled fearfully along its shores;
dreading the very breezes which centuries later were destined to become the
best friends of more skilful navigators. It has been It took the Europeans and Africans a long time since the
Phoenicians to conquered the Mediterranean; butthose who say that the Arctic will
"forever" remain unconquered should remember that forever is a longer time than
all of recorded history. We are Some practical and well-informed people are a1ready beginning to say that the crossing of
the Arctic by airplane and airship is a certainty of the next few years. Those
who know the polar ocean in the sense in which a sailor knows the Atlantic think
equally well of the submarine, and it may not be many years between the first
crossing of the Arctic through the air above the ice and the first crossing
through the water below the ice. Whenever the Arctic shall become as crossable to
us as the Mediterranean was to the Phoenicians, it will become more of a connect-
ing link between the continents than a barrier. The fact of its central location
with regard to the lands will then be of paramount importance. The roads between
various suburbs tend to run through the center of a city, and so will the roads
between the lands have a tendency to meet and cross in or near the Arctic because it is near the center of the
land masses. This tendency will become constantly more marked with our growing
mastery of the air and with the northward spread crawling of civilization in into Alaska,
Canada and Siberia.

While the Wrangell Island expedition was based upon the north and
south roundness of the earth from the transportation point of view, upon the small-
ness of the Arctic, its crossability by airship and airplane, and its central

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